O my soul! O my lamb! seek not after things which concern thee not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace. Of a truth thou hast spoken many words; and there is no harm done, for the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here, and never desire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our understandings? God forbid! Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of his creation? Shall we say, behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and cometh in so many years! Let it go! He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it. But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou art better in this respect than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God, I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for: and as for that which thou hast seen I defile it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise with thine eyes? O my friend! if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God! Do no evil, and thus wilt thou The meek in spirit (El Fakir), This is merely a modern rendering of the conclusion of Ecclesiastes: When I applied mine heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done upon the earth: (for also there is that neither day nor night seeth sleep with his eyes:) Then I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea farther; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it.2 For the modern Oriental as for the ancient the beginning and the end of wisdom is the fear of God. Yet one must not forget the other aspect of this literature we are studying, that these books have maintained their hold on men of all degrees of education through more than two thousand years, and that they have stood the test of translation into languages of totally different genius and structure-perhaps 1A. H. Layard, Discoveries in Nineveh and Babylon, N. Y., 1853, p. 663. 2 Eccles. viii. 16-17. the most striking case of persistence in all the history of literature. Assuming, as always, the fact of inspiration, we may wonder how any medium of expression can be capable of conveying the same ideas to men of such different ages and stages of culture. The seeming paradox of the permanence of such works as these books of Hebrew wisdom may remind us that, after all, the power of abstract reasoning is only a small part of the faculties of our minds. To quote Professor James again: "Over immense departments of our thought we are still, all of us, in the savage state. Similarity operates in us, but abstraction has not taken place. We know what the present case is like, we know what it reminds us of, we have an intuition of the right course to take, if it be a practical matter. But analytic thought has made no tracks, and we cannot justify ourselves to others. In ethical, psychological, and æsthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one's judgment is universally recognized as a mark of rare genius.' In other words, underneath the purely intellectual faculties on which we moderns plume ourselves there lies the far greater and richer mass of our emotional and instinctive faculties. Even in the most highly civilized races instinct and emotion constitute all the deeper parts of the mental life; and it 1 James, Psychology, II, 365. is in this larger and fuller realm of consciousness that the Hebrew wisdom has its roots. By putting its thoughts in concrete words, which name always palpable things, and by clothing its words with poetical form, it gained the same permanence of meaning that the sensations and emotions themselves have, and will have until many ages have evolved man into an animal very different from us. The permanent place of these books in our literature would be proof enough, if proof were needed, that intuition without reasoning reaches deeper and more permanent truths than does reasoning alone, and of the further truth that if such deep and permanent truths are to be bodied forth in any language it must be concrete in its terms and endowed first of all with the power of expressing emotion. We read these books with the constant sense of the justness with which they sum up experience even for us to-day; but they do not even tend to inosculate with our modern efforts to unravel the mysteries of the universe. They trust wholly to intuition, and through this trust arrive at glimpses of the verities which lie behind the mask of experience. CHAPTER V THE EPISTLES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT I IF one, after reading in the Old Testament, passes on directly into the first three gospels one finds almost no change of literary atmosphere: in their mode of thought and of expression they belong to the Oriental world. The narrative, as we have seen, has almost the same concreteness of vocabulary and simplicity of sentence structure; and the apparatus of connectives between the parts is almost as limited. Even the literary form of the teachings of Jesus is closely like that of kindred forms in the Old Testament. If we make a rough classification of these teachings into aphorisms, practical injunctions, prophetic sayings, and parables we shall find each of these four forms paralleled in the Old Testament. For the aphorisms compare a passage from St. Matthew, No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he |