COPYRIGHT, 1916, 1919, BY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 319.7 The Athenæum Press 1 ΤΟ GEORGE FREDERICK GENUNG TWIN BROTHER IN RECOGNITION OF A LIFETIME SHARED WITH HIM IN THE FULL WEALTH OF THAT INTIMATE RELATION BOTH OF NATURE AND OF THE SPIRIT 472569 PREFACE HIS book is meant to be just what its title names it : Ta a a guidebook to the Biblical literature, not a substitute for it. Its office is subsidiary, not principal. One does not study a guidebook for its own sake. The familiar little redcovered volumes that deck the traveled man's shelf bear witness not to erudition in that species of literature but to intimate memories and experiences wherein the useful manual that pointed out the scene of them is forgotten. So may it fare with the guidebook herewith introduced to the reader. The desired stimulus of it, if indeed it can lay any claim to such effect, is meant to be toward the straight study of the Bible itself, as one would study a virgin object of science, without deflection, without denial, without surrogate. Its postulate is that the Bible, reverently, and constructively interrogated, is its own best interpreter. It bears the same relation, accordingly, to the wealth and width of the literature to which it would direct its readers that Murray and Baedeker bear to the lands and cities and treasures of their research; and its best hopes will be met if it succeeds, in some deserving measure, in placing them at the fair and free point of view whence, surveying with open eye the rich realm of the Biblical literature, they may see and know it as it essentially is. · In essaying, on the scale and scope here contemplated, to be a guide through so vast a tract of literary wealth, the author's most exacting problem has risen not from the difficulty or abstruseness of the subject but from its largeness, its sheer embarras de richesses. Here in a single volume is a book covering the life of many centuries which, as Pascal phrases it, was not made by an individual author and dispensed among the people but which itself, as it emerged and grew, made the people; that is to say, which purveyed for a nation peculiarly gifted and responsive the spiritual light and truth that it needed for the right uses of life in its successive homes and ages and conditions. Immense treasures of matter and manner must needs be noted and weighed, whether reduced to the scale of this guidebook or not; there is also to be adjusted the everbesetting tendency, figured in the old proverb, to miss the forest for the trees. No end of values are there for the gathering, each abundantly rewarding after its kind. He that seeketh findeth, and in so rich profusion that each department of research, once explored and organized, is prone to claim the monopoly and ignore or contemn the others. Hence the grim controversies that for centuries have so wrought to cleave the Bible truth into parcels and parties, vehement screeds of doctor and saint, with their controversies warrantable enough, perhaps, to myopic human nature, but generally reducible, for all their solemn sincerity, to some phase of smallness or one-sidedness. Yet, even so, they are not to be scorned; there are shreds of truth at the bottom of them; but neither are they to be emulated. The truth that is in them may be found, I am sure, in some more tolerant way, some way more consistent with comity of spirit and aim. But to find it one must ascend; must reach some point above, where the tangled lines meet and unite. The Biblical literature, after all, does make for plainness, simplicity, unity; it requires only that one shall find the master-key and consistently use it. This is why, as intimated above, I desiderate a fair and free point of view: fair, I mean, to all sides, all moods, all constituent factors, |