found the varieties of literary form yielded by the Sacred Scriptures, when these are investigated in the spirit of Comparative Literature. I have spoken so far from the point of view of those who are specially Bible students. But a consideration of a different kind has had weight with me in the production of this book the place in liberal education of the Bible treated as literature. It has come by now to be generally recognised that the Classics of Greece and Rome stand to us in the position of an ancestral literature, the inspiration of our great masters, and bond of common associations between our poets and their readers. But does not such a position belong equally to the literature of the Bible? if our intellect and imagination have been formed by the Greeks, have we not in similar fashion drawn our moral and emotional training from Hebrew thought? Whence then the neglect of the Bible in our higher schools and colleges? It is one of the curiosities of our civilisation that we are content to go for our liberal education to literatures which, morally, are at an opposite pole from ourselves : literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human level, but to the lowest level of humanity. Our hardest social problem being temperance, we study in Greek the glorification of intoxication; while in mature life we are occupied in tracing law to the remotest corner of the universe, we go at school for literary impulse to the poetry that dramatises the burden of hopeless fate. Our highest politics aim at conserving the arts of peace, our first poetic lessons are in an Iliad that cannot be appreciated without a bloodthirsty joy in killing. We seek to form a character in which delicacy and reserve shall be supreme, and at the same time are training our taste in literatures which, if published as English books, would be seized by the police. I recall these paradoxes, not to make objection, but to suggest the reasonableness of the claim that the one side of our liberal education should have another side to balance it. Prudish fears may be unwise, but there is no need to put an embargo upon decency. It is surely good that our youth, during the formative period, should have displayed to them, in a literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek literature in lyrics which Pindar cannot surpass, in rhetoric as forcible as that of Demosthenes, or contemplative prose not inferior to Plato's a people dominated by an utter passion for righteousness, a people whom ideas of purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible downfall of all moral evil, moved to a poetic passion as fervid, and speech as musical, as when Sappho sang of love or Eschylus thundered his deep notes of destiny. When it is added that the familiarity of the English Bible renders all this possible without the demand upon the time-table that would be involved in the learning of another language, it seems clear that our school and college curricula will not have shaken off their mediæval narrowness and renaissance paganism until Classical and Biblical literatures stand side by side as sources of our highest culture. It remains to add that, in the present edition, the work has been revised, and partly re-written. The structural printing of Scripture, for which I contended in the first edition, has since been carried into effect in the volumes of the Modern Reader's Bible. This has enabled me to reduce some of my lengthier illustrations; and also to be more precise in part of my systematisation. In particular, I have attempted in a new Appendix (III) to reduce to a system Biblical Versification, with all its elaborations, so far as it is based upon parallelism of structure. The other Appendices, that which I call a Literary Index to the Bible (I), and another which contains a technical Table of Literary Forms (II), have been considerably revised. The order of the six books has been altered, and the matter of the first two books recast, chiefly in the interest of a more logical plan. As so much recasting might create difficulties in regard to references made in other books to the present work, I have (page 557) given a Refer 1 Published by Macmillan. ence Table which connects the paging of the first and the present editions. The citations, as before, are from the Revised Version of the Bible and Apocrypha, for the use of which I am under obligation to the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge. It is with the greatest satisfaction that I have noticed, in the four years which have intervened since the first edition of this work, the rapid advance in public recognition of the specially literary study of the Bible. And the testimony of all who promote it concurs in confirming what is the foundation axiom of my work that an increased apprehension of outer literary form is a sure means of deepening spiritual effect. June, 1899. RICHARD G. MOULTON. |