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and gave her many explanations of the exigencies of army life, with the manner of one who knows nothing and wishes to appear wise.

I have always been much interested in these silent and intimate little scenes that one guesses at more than one seesthe pantomimes of the street, seen as one walks along, scenes that by a single gesture reveal to one a whole existence; but that which attracted me most here was the awkwardness, the naïveté of the couple, and I experienced a real emotion in following this scene, and these gestures, clear and expressive as the spirits of two actors, embodying all the events of a pretty little drama.

I imagined the mother crying to herself one morning: "That M. Troches annoys me with his orders. . . . It is three months now since I have seen my child. . . . I am crazy to kiss him once again." The father, timid, shy, frightened at the idea of applying for a permit, tries at first to reason with her:

"But you don't think, dear, Mont Valérien is a long way off. How are you going to get there without a carriage? Moreover, it is a citadel! Women cannot

enter it."

"I shall enter," says the mother; and as he does everything that she wishes, the man starts off. He goes to the town hall, to the staff office, to the commissioner, sweating with terror, freezing with cold, knocking about, mistaking doors, waiting two hours in line at an office and then finding it to be the wrong one. At last, in the evening, he comes home with the permit from the Governor in his pocket. The next morning they get up very early, in the cold, by lamplight. The father munches a crust to get warm, but the mother is not hungry. She prefers to breakfast at the fort with her son. And for a treat for the poor boy, they quickly empty into the bag food collected during the siege chocolate, preserves, sealed wine, and even the savings box (a box with eight francs) that they have kept so carefully against a rainy day. Then they start off. As they arrive at the fort, the gates have just been opened. They are forced to show their permit. It is the mother who is afraid now-but no! it seems to be all right. "Let them pass !" says the adjutant on duty.

breathes :

"That

Then the mother officer was very polite." And, nimble as a young partridge, she trots along; hurries so that the man can hardly keep up with her.

"How fast you go, deary !"

But she does not listen to him. Up there in the mist on the horizon, Mont Valérien is beckoning to her:

"Come quickly, he is here."

And now that they have arrived, there is a new anxiety. If they do not find him! If he should not come!

Suddenly I saw her tremble, touch the old man on the arm, and straighten up with a bound. Far off, under the arch of the postern, she had recognized his step. It is he!

When he appeared, everything seemed glorified.

A fine big fellow he was!-well built, a knapsack on his back, a gun in hand. He greeted them with a frank look, a manly and a happy voice,

"Good morning, Mamma."

And at once the knapsack, cloak, gun, everything disappeared into the big pokebonnet. Then the father had his turn, but not for long; the poke-bonnet was insatiable.

"How are you? Are you well clothed? Have you enough to wear?"

And, from under the ruffles of the bonnet, I felt the long gaze of love with which she covered him from head to foot, in a shower of kisses, of tears, of little laughs—arrears of three months' motherly tenderness paid to him at last with interest. The father was also much moved, but he did not wish to appear so. He knew that we were looking at him, and winked in our direction as if to say: "Forgive her! she is a woman." As though I didn't forgive her!

A mighty sound broke suddenly on that beautiful joy.

"The drums are beating to arms," said the boy; "I must go.”

"What! you are not going to breakfast with us?"

"No, I cannot; I am on duty for twentyfour hours, way up in the fort."

"Oh!" said the poor woman; she could say no more.

The three stood looking at each other for a moment in consternation. Then the father began to speak:

"At least take the box," he said, in a broken-hearted voice, with a touching and a comic expression. But there ! In the sorrow and emotion of the parting, that cursed box could not be found; it was pitiful to watch those feverish and trembling hands, that searched, that shook; to hear those voices broken by tears that cried, "The box! where are our savings?" They were not ashamed to mention this detail in the face of so great a sorrow. The box was found at last, and there was one last long embrace, and the child hurriedly re-entered the fort.

Just think of how far they had come for that breakfast, of how they had magnified it into a great feast; think that the mother had not slept the night before on account of it; and tell me if you know of anything so heartbreaking as that tragic little party

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The Exegesis of To-Morrow'

By Benjamin W. Bacon, D.D.

O-MORROW is the future which is near enough to be quite clearly and distinctly conceived, and yet is never quite attained. The exegesis (i. e., Scripture interpretation) of the twentieth century is much more difficult to conceive, and will be antiquated in the twenty-first century. The exegesis of tomorrow only produces the lines of to-day's, but will never be antiquated, because it is ideal. It will never, indeed, be attained. But it can be indefinitely approximated.

Perhaps it may be imagined that the science of exegesis does not change; or at least that there is no very marked change from decade to decade since the vagaries of allegorical interpretation, making the spoons and snuffers of the tabernacle symbolize the Christian graces, and the scarlet woman of Revelation the Pope or Napoleon Bonaparte, were consigned to the limbo of theological curiosities. I assure you such an idea is erroneous. The science of exegesis has made enormous strides during the nineteenth century, but it has still greater strides to make in adjusting itself to the marvelous discoveries of modern archæology and the revolutionizing results of criticism.

1 Being part of an address delivered at the opening of Yale Divinity School, September 27, 1900.

Less than twenty years ago criticism meant scarcely more than the study of textual variants, the minute changes of reading which have crept into the text of the New Testament in course of its transmission, and which in less than one case in one thousand materially affect the sense. Criticism to-day means the study of the origin as well as the transmission of the text. It asks not only the comparatively simple question, What did the author write? but, Who was he? and How came he to write as he did? The difficult and abstruse but vitally important problems of authenticity, date, sources, occasion, credibility, are all involved, and upon their solution depends in large measure the value if not the meaning of the writing in question.

But not only has the term criticism, by the necessity of growth, come to include the higher as well as the lower, or textual, so that no man can to-day be esteemed competent to interpret the Scripture writings who knows nothing of modern investigation into the history of their origin; the term exegesis as well implies a different method from that of twenty years ago. At that time traditional theories of the historical conditions which so largely determine the sense of Scripture writings

were either deemed so certain, or critical theories so uncertain, that comparatively little use could be made of this principal source of light upon the author's meaning. Moreover, the battle was but half won over the crude dogmatism of what we may call eisegesis (ie., reading into the text our meaning, as against exegesis, i.e., reading out the author's meaning). Advocates of different theological systems were then still hauling their drag-net through ten centuries of Jewish literature in search of phrases to set up as proof-texts, making havoc of the author's sense in order to secure the authority of his name in support of their own; and against this egotism, intrenched as it was in popular favor by the pious pretense of beingHeaven save the mark !" Scriptural," the only sure weapon was the slow, laborious accumulation of the fixed rules of grammar and vocabulary. In the monumental works on Biblical grammar and lexicography, and the great concordances to Old and New Testaments, produced during the nineteenth century, we have enduring bulwarks, impregnable so long as men have skill to employ them, against the inroads of arbitrary interpretation. They are our firmest guarantee that the Protestant standard of faith and practice will not be turned into a laughing-stock under the gibe, Scripture means whatever the individual interpreter wants it to. Our highest tributes of honor to the Geseniuses, the Buxtorffs, the Redpaths, the Thayers, Winers, Moultons, and Geddens, will be none too high for the men who have forever silenced this jeer by disposing of the arbitrary interpreter, and restoring to the Scripture writers the right to mean what they say whether in agreement with modern theological views or not. When He brew and Greek words and constructions are proved to have a definite, specific meaning, instead of being at the mercy of the hunter for proof-texts, then, and then only, can exegesis aspire to be deemed a science, rather than a craft of mental jugglery. All honor, then, to the great masters of Biblical grammar and philology, and may we prove the sincerity of our praise by acquiring a mastery of the superb machinery they have bequeathed to us.

And yet the very emphasis laid upon rigidly scientific philology, necessitating microscopic analysis of single words and

phrases, has proved in some respects almost disastrous. The very type of "grasshopper exegesis" antagonized was unintentionally re-enforced by the unavoidable concentration of study so minute, to the comparative neglect of the larger context. If a class took six weeks to get over three verses of John, their ability to apply the argument from dominant Johannine ideas would not be great; and yet, after all, it is this argument from context, and above all the larger context of the writer's entire product-yes, and of the literature and thought in which his ideas appear to have been molded-which must finally dispose of the grasshopper exegete. The popular notion of Scripture as an aggregate of little oracles, separate nuggets of divine utterance dropped from time to time, but all of a piece as to value, and gathered by the mysterious work of the canon-makers into one bag, from which they may be drawn at random, aggravated by the Massoretic division into verses, which Robert Stephens in 1551 extended for convenience of reference into the New Testament, receives but too much aid and comfort from such minuteness of method. And if in one sense we appear to be honoring the Scripture by devoting such extreme labor to the analysis of the smallest words and phrases, and the discrimination of the minutest shades of meaning, it is to be feared that the very honor may be perverted into a promotion of that bibliolatry which characterized the scribe and Pharisee, and which, in spite of our Lord's explicit denunciation, has been for centuries the stronghold of all that was most bigoted, most intolerant, most unchristian in his own Church. For nine pupils out of ten who have never known any other method of exegesis than this, the writings it aims to expound will be as dead and dry thereafter as Egyptian mummies, the very name of exegesis will be a nightmare, and a critical commentary will be the ninefold wet blanket with which the last lingering spark of Pentecostal fire in Apostolic words is extinguished. It is like botanizing in a laboratory on the dried specimens of a herbarium. With sufficient violence to nature the process can be learned, results can be achieved, results of indispensable importance have been achieved. But, after all, to appreciate flowers one must

know them in their natural environment; and to know, to love, and to utilize woodland, farm, and meadow for what they are to the hunter, the husbandman, and the lover of nature is something which, when sacrificed to mere laboratory analysis, makes us not the gainers but the losers.

Fortunately, there is no need that we should sacrifice it. Exegesis in its nature should be inspiring, as its subject is inspired-not in the dry, scholastic sense, but in the sense that the Biblical writers are men whose lips have been consciously touched with coals from off the altar of God, who "speak that they do know, and testify that they have seen," who pour out their souls in ardent, impassioned earnestness of conviction, because mastered by the eternal truths of which God has given them glimpses. They are men who cry out with the prophet: "The lion hath roared, who will not fear; the Lord God hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" and with the Apostle exclaim: "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel!" To be a true exegete is to range one's self alongside these men, find their environment, take their point of view, fight their battles, until we think their thoughts after them, till our hearts echo an Amen to their ringing words, and our pulses throb with the impulse to take up and herald their glorious gospel, if need be to suffer for it, as they suffered, rejoicing that, though heaven and earth should pass away, their Godgiven word could not pass away.

I can conceive of two things, and only two, which can make that a dull study which, by however laborious effort brings us into living, vital contact with men baptized in fire and the Holy Ghost, with writings which even now are the greatest factor in the transformation of the world from the kingdom of the beast into the kingdom of the Son of God. One of the two would be a pedantic rabbinism teaching men to search the Scriptures with a microscope because they think that in them they have eternal life, so that, though these testify of the Man of Nazareth, yet they never come unto him that they may have life. Disciples of such a school are convinced that the Scriptures are allimportant, and, drawing the false inference that therefore each separate clause and syllable in itself is all-important, they cannot see the wood for the trees. One tree,

one branch, one twig, absorbs them, and they hear not the sound of the rustling in the tree-tops as the Spirit of God sweeps over and before them. Dull and wearisome indeed is the servitude of the letter where the sweep of the Spirit has passed on and left us plodding.

And equally wearisome must it be to the man whose soul really questions whether the importance so long attached to these Biblical writings is not, after all, one half pretense and the other half mistake. Suspect that even the abiding results of the vast libraries of learning spent in the elucidation of these Biblical writings are largely wasted because the writings themselves have no such unique importance as has been attached to them, and the mastery of the subject will prove indeed a dull study. There are those who think that such is the unavoidable result of the higher criticism, and who oppose it accordingly. If a knowledge of the processes, generally simple and humble. enough, through which these writings. have come into being and into the position of authority which they occupy, begins to supersede in the public mind the childlike notion of a mysterious, miraculous origin, the result must be, they reason, a widespread conviction that the importance of the writings themselves has been greatly exaggerated, and a corresponding indifference to them. Reluctantly, I admit that there does seem to me to exist a certain type of criticism the motive and animus of which are scarcely more than this. Believing that the Biblical writings owe their honor in preponderant degree to a factitious authority, their paramount influence being due, not to their intrinsic worth, but to a false notion of their origin, critics of this type naturally deem it a service to the truth to unmask the pretense. Now, the more we have of bibliolatry the more we shall have of this type of criticism, which finds all the justification it has in bibliolatry, and all the victims it can claim among those who never had a vital love for the Scriptures through personal apprehension of their worth, but only a superstitious awe of them for the assumed miraculousness of their origin. If this is all that is meant by faith in the Bible and its inspiration, then, indeed, that faith has much to fear from criticism. If this is all the function of criticism, then, however

needful, its task will be one of destroying is more apparent than real.
its own roots. For what has produced
the study of the origins of the Biblical
writings if not the vital interest we have
in their content? And how can that
interest survive if it depends upon a notion
of their origin which it is the tendency of
investigation to destroy?

But there is another type of criticism, thank God! which otherwise conceives its task. Conscious though it is that the authority, inspiration, and value of Scripture are often wrongly made to rest, not upon its intrinsic power of kindling the spark of spiritual life, but upon notions of its origin regarded as more truly divine, because more extraordinary and mysterious, than the humble, unobtrusive processes out of which they really come, criticism of this type yet feels its mission to be, not to destroy, but to fulfill. It seeks to become the servant and not the enemy of exegesis, to investigate this story of the origins of our sacred books, partly that we may learn to reverence the normal as divine, at least as much as the abnormal; partly that the knowledge of these origins may illuminate as never before the doubly sacred page, and bring the reader into that close and living contact with the writers which shall make him know by the burning of his heart within him that they were men inspired of God, vessels of the Pentecostal fire. Thank God for such criticism! and thank God for the thousands of students who to-day declare that it has made the Bible for them a new and living book, and torn away the veil of scholasticism from their eyes!

I am well aware that there cannot fail to be a disappearance of a certain type of factitious reverence for the Scripture writings, as criticism, whether constructive or destructive, dissipates the notion that they owe their authority to the miraculous circumstances of their origin. This is the common type of honor paid them. But can we truly say that it promotes to any appreciable degree the reading of them with practical, vital interest? Are those whose belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures is based on the most abnormal and magical conception of their origin and nature-are these the readers who are most inspired by them? If not, the loss from the disappearance of belief in an inspiration which failed to inspire

Multitudes

who declare that the critical theory of the Hexateuch has deprived them of the religious solace they found in the tradition of its Mosaic authorship, when questioned, are found to have the vaguest idea of its contents, and far less interest in its relation to the progress of divine revelation in the history of Israel than the humblest of the higher critics.

Criticism, destructive and constructive, will inevitably dissipate much factitious and nominal reverence for the Scripture writings, for the same reason that the evolutionary theory of creation to many minds seemed inevitably atheistic. Whether it be a Bible or a world that God is creating, an insight into the how he does it, the wonderfully humble, simple means that he employs, will inevitably. suggest to a certain type of mind the idea that it cannot be God who is at work in this simple way: the thing must be creating itself. Now, the whole study of the origins of the Scripture writings and their relation to contemporary thought and events is directed to nothing else than the "how" of God's working in this incomparable spiritual creation. Accordingly, the apparent loss in interest and reverence will be great in direct proportion as this interest and reverence have been founded, not on their intrinsic nature or redemptive power, but upon a theory about them. The real loss will be a very different matter. It will be like the transference of a bad bill receivable, which has long swelled the column of assets, to the profit and loss account where it belongs. We have lost-what? An illusion that threatened us daily with bankruptcy while we trusted it. And the gain? We have begun to understand the Scriptures genetically, which is almost equivalent to saying we are making the first beginnings, popularly, at understanding them at all. To the credit of that destructive criticism, if it exists, whose sole object was to destroy the refuge of bibliolatry by a study of the historical processes out of which were brought-we say not by what power-the sacred writings and the canon, we may still place the present tendency to transfer the ground of Scripture authority from a rabbinic to a Christian basis; to find the evidence of inspiration in present power

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