The Methods of Mr. Barnes

...That book will be, of necessity, inadequate and inconsequential, but not any more so than is this exposition of twilight...

...He cites book, chapter and verse, and for this favor he will doubtless receive the thanks of undergraduates and other adolescents who have heard that there is spicy reading in the Bible, but who perhaps did not know exactly where to find the specific passages...

...Because everyone who reflects at all must have conceptions about the world which go beyond the field of science, that is, beyond the present range of intellectual knowledge...

...The principal of selection is not indicated, but it seems that biblical scholarship makes even stranger bedfellows than politics...

...He might-and he does...

...The erudite will see in those excerpts the unmistakable earmarks of careful scholarship, and we are now in a position to appreciate the unerring judicial instinct that led Mr...

...One's judgment that Mr...

...Why...

...He mentions, offhand, the Codex Vaticanus, the Codex Sinaiticus, the Gilgamesh Epic and the code of Hammurabi...

...He rejects the idea that anything is "sinful": One of the most vital and important of the fossils embodied in orthodoxy is the conception of sin...

...This important fact about the Bible seems to have escaped Mr...

...If we have indeed reached the twilight of Christianity and the night falls it will be black as the Cimmerian desert...

...Among bona fide scientists he cites R. A. Millikan but only to disagree with him...

...Let me hasten to say for the benefit of those readers, especially abroad, who are not aware of what great strides biblical criticism has made in America, that Joseph Lewis is a strictly American product and that with the publication of one or two little masterpieces, he achieved for himself a position quite unique in the world of biblical learning...

...The Twilight of Christianity has a chapter on Science versus Religion...

...Bryan, who informed Mr...

...That he should do so was perhaps inevitable, but none the less unfortunate...

...The pious German peasant takes it for granted that God spoke to Moses in the German language of Luther's translation...

...Again, after three pages of quotation from that earlier and perhaps even more famous American biblical scholar, Thomas Paine, we read: I challenge every minister of Christianity to refute Thomas Paine's exposure of this all too monstrous lie and the most dastardly piece of imposition ever perpetrated upon the human race...

...Barnes descends to a little spoofing...

...I must confess that I find it disappointing...

...Once we wipe out the validity of the notion of sin there would appear to be slight justification for the ministration and activities of the Church...

...The attitude of the faithful believer is that of the late Mr...

...The entire book is like that, and there are almost five hundred pages of it...

...Professor Millikan had said: The world is of course "incurably religious...

...Barnes to allot Joseph Lewis a place side by side with Wellhausen, Harnack, and the other great masters...

...Well-he might...

...At least he quotes Fosdick a dozen times and Loisy not at all...

...Again and again the suspicion had been intruding itself that Mr...

...I have space for only the first, but it will suffice: I. Thou shalt understand the factors of progress to be "a changing environment, a modifiable self, a reproductive process, and a conflict of forces resulting in selection of stable organizations and disintegration of unstable ones...

...I arrived at that curious statement on page 314...

...Barnes) pays tribute to the Bible in words like these: The Psalms remain, whether in the Latin version or in the authorized English translation, the most pathetic and poignant, as well as the most noble and dignified of all poetic literature...

...Harry Elmer Barnes's latest book, The Twilight of Christianity (New York: The Vanguard Press...

...So I find myself in a dilemma...

...Barnes quotes from one of his authorities a revised edition of the Ten Commandments...

...Barnes tell us simply if he agrees with Russell...

...The more recent developments of physiology have only brought this home in a new way...

...Sir Bertram was not bitter, he was not unscrupulous, he was not even an enemy of evolution...

...His opinions in this realm are even sillier than his infallible dogmatizings in the realm of biblical criticism...

...Barnes presents "an anthology of scriptural obscenity" culled from various "critics" unnamed...

...They may even come to see why it is that a modern pagan and sceptic like John Cowper Powys (by the way a favorite of Mr...

...A somewhat more sophisticated order of believers imagine that God spoke in the Hebrew language and assume that there was a specific Hebrew language distinct from the other Semitic tongues of the near Orient...

...Barnes rather undermines my confidence and alienates my sympathy by calling my dear friend, the late lamented Sir Bertram Windle, among others, a "bitter and unscrupulous enemy of evolution...

...Indeed, adultery would seem frequently to be socially, indispensable in certain areas like South Carolina, where there exists no legal ground for divorce...

...Marshall and the Atlantic Monthly, Tammany Hall and Cardinal O'Connell...

...Does he really think Professor Moehlman, writer of the revised Commandments, has hit it off better than Moses...

...Tis a lie," said Mike, "No man living can lep forty feet...

...He says: Psychology, founded upon physiology, neurology and sound methods of investigation, has made remarkable strides in giving us a firm and naturalistic grasp upon the problems of human behavior...

...Its method and the quality of its scholarship may be readily estimated from one or two characteristic excerpts: Like a dissatisfied heir, the human race might well say to God, "If the Bible is the best you can give us, we don't want it...

...All Christian Bibles are believed to be essentially the same-the difference being primarily variations in typography, format and binding...

...Barnes, I suspect, is making use of the little old dodge of speaking partly in jest and wholly in earnest...

...After that we are mercifully given two pages in which to catch our breath, which is promptly knocked out of us by a paragraph on the tango, the maxixe, the shimmy, the hug-me-tight, the kitchen sink, the mucilage glide and the tickle-toe...

...Barnes rather favors Fosdick...

...The above is a faithful and exact description of the view of the Bible entertained by all orthodox laymen in the United States and by a great majority of orthodox clergymen...

...It is a product of the hop-skip-and-jump school of literature...

...For we find F. C. Conybeare side by side with Joseph Lewis, and Alfred Loisy cheek by jowl with Harry Emerson Fosdick...

...But there is one exception-Joseph Lewis...

...Barnes certainly does give you a run for your money...

...But they say 'tis your own bye Dinny that does it...

...His compeer, Bertrand Russell, has written in favor of adultery in certain circumstances...

...Barnes cites volume and page...

...But on page 314 the doubt disappeared...

...I think those few paragraphs will sufficiently indicate that posterity will assign Harry Elmer Barnes a place in the Joseph Lewis school of biblical criticism, rather than in the school to which belongs Harnack or Wellhausen or Loisy...

...If the average reader were to pick up the Bible without any advance knowledge or presuppositions, he would be likely to regard it as an amazingly dull and tedious book in many parts, extremely preposterous in others, contradictory in description, ridiculous and degrading in its basic philosophy and interspersed with passages eulogizing cruelty and brutality or dispensing obscenity...

...Apparently he does, for he says something that is virtually a quotation from Russell: There is not a single item in the sex mores of a conventionally respectable American today which squares with either science or aesthetics...

...That materialistic view of human life is scarcely consonant with the opinion of J. S. Haldane, who says in his most recent volume, The Sciences and Philosophy: From its first beginnings the mechanistic theory of life was embarked on a hopeless task...

...Barnes assures us that he gave years out of his young life to the mastery of the biblical question...

...Barnes makes some incursions into the field of ethics...

...He explains that the Pentateuch is badly named, because it contains eleven books, not five...

...We shall not quarrel over those two disputable propositions...

...Barnes is pleased to call him "one of the most brilliant of modern psychologists," and "a learned Catholic of liberal inclinations...

...He assures us that no "reasonable person could doubt" that it is "a tremendous improvement upon the original Ten Commandments...

...Then read Harry Elmer Barnes...

...It reminded me again and again, as I read, of the story of Pat who was boasting to Mike: "They say there's a bye in town who can lep forty feet...

...A Catholic is likely to believe that God revealed himself in Latin...

...In his case, Mr...

...From that moment, I know...

...This is of course a mere matter of custom, handed down fr>m a previous generation...

...Of the latter pair, Mr...

...No one can have read him, still less have met him and talked with him, without recognizing in him one of the gentlest, humblest and fairest of scholars...

...It may be that there are still some physiologists who believe that the progress of physiology is bringing us nearer to a physico-chemical conception of life...

...One cannot but admire the nonchalance with which Mr...

...Three pages later President McKinley explains why he kept the Philippine Islands...

...Finally, Mr...

...and such outdated propagandists as Andrew D. White and J. W. Draper...

...However, it is not merely sex sin that seems unimportant to Dr...

...As a matter of fact, he leaps from all this cheap journalistic trash plump into the middle of the deep and treacherous waters of biblical criticism...

...As soon as we get beyond that range we are in the field that belongs to religion, and no one knows better than the man who works in science how soon we get beyond the boundaries of the known...

...His opus magnum is entitled The Bible Unmasked...

...Then in quick order come fleeting references to witchcraft, sex instruction and lynching, and an attack on the gospel of work by Hendrik Willem Van Loon, who explains that animals "must fill their bellies, and they can only get their bellies full by going through certain muscular motions, but that the moment their hunger has been stilled, they are content to rest...

...On the next page there is a jumble of names-Henry IV of Germany, Pope Gregory VII, Philip Augustus of France, Mr...

...But perhaps in another volume of the same title as the one we have been considering, Mr...

...In point of fact, none of the great masters is allowed to speak for himself, though there are 120 pages of quotation in the volume...

...In that passage Mr...

...He admits that his "facts about the Pentateuch" are presented "altogether too briefly and incompletely to give any true picture of the complexity of the situation," but he is confident that he has shown, by merely stating his opinion, that the Bible is a document of purely natural origin...

...When you realize that you have covered all that ground-and more-in about twenty pages, you will confess that Mr...

...Darrow that he would have been ready to believe that Jonah swallowed the whale, provided a statement to this effect existed in the Bible...

...I assemble a few, chosen here and there: In regard to the language used by God in dictating the Bible, or more sensibly, the language used by the secular authors of the Bible, it will hardly be necessary to insist that neither God nor the secular scribes used the modern English, German, French, Italian or Russian languages...

...This passage, reasonable though it seems, irritates Mr...

...I say none of the masters of biblical criticism is quoted...

...Barnes's own method of biblical criticism...

...Fearing that some of his readers, though doubtless addicted to serious scholarship, may not possess a Bible, and reluctant to have them miss anything of special interest that it contains, Mr...

...I wonder if it can be that at this point Mr...

...However, if the youngsters go poking around in the Bible, they may find a few things not mentioned by Mr...

...Barnes is a historian and sociologist rather than a scientist, and Professor Haldane is admittedly one of the world's greatest biologists, I think we need scarcely hesitate as to whose judgment we shall prefer...

...In charity I choose the latter supposition...

...Barnes does indeed mention a few genuine scientists, in the midst of such lesser representatives of science and religion as William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow and John Roach Straton...

...He speaks with easy familiarity of the "J" source, the "E" source, the "D" source and the "P" source of the Pentateuch...

...There are perhaps few physiologists who now consider that they have any real conception of these mechanisms...

...Barrett would, I imagine, disclaim the importance attached to While Peter Sleeps, and The Jesuit Enigma as authoritative sources of information on the relationship between religion and science...

...To scholars it is equally absurd to hold that the Bible was either dictated or written in a so-called Hebrew language, for there has never been any such thing as a unique, special or distinct Hebrew tongue...

...Since Mr...

...Thus far we have, for example: The Seventh Commandment, which forbids adultery, might be accepted as sound in general practice, but one can conceive of many conditions in which adultery would not only be permissible but even commendable...

...In current physiological literature it is still customary, in describing what is known as to different bodily activities, to refer to them as "mechanisms"-for instance, the "mechanisms" of reproduction, respiration, secretion, etc...

...At least there is no evidence in this volume that he even knows the names of the chief opponents of Harnack, Loisy, Delitzsch and Wellhausen...

...On pages 51 and 52, for example, there is a long description of the horrors of the Puritan Sunday...

...That seems strange at first, but as we go along we notice that Wellhausen is only named, not quoted, and so is it with Cheyne and Driver and Hermann Hupfeld...

...The devout Christian believes that there is no doubt whatever as to just what books were dictated by God, and he takes it for granted that everyone is in complete agreement as to the authentic and approved content of Holy Scriptures...

...Barnes mentions Delitzsch and Well-hausen, Harnack, Loisy, Schweitzer and a dozen other famous scholars...

...When the notion of sin is lost, all is lost...

...At the end of each chapter he has a number of Selected References...

...Barnes, you are joking...

...No, Mr...

...It has established the fundamental physico-chemical relationship between mind and body and has completely discredited the older spiritistic interpretations...

...Barnes has not really prepared himself to write on science, is further verified by one's finding in this chapter frequent quotations from E. Boyd Barrett...

...Either Mr...

...We would be better off without it...

...Chaos will come again...

...But may we, in our stupid way, ask him to be particularly literal at just this point...

...Speaking, like Henry Adams, in the third person, he writes impersonally of himself: He thoroughly familiarized himself with the essentials of biblical scholarship when an undergraduate, and then abandoned completely the traditional view of the nature and authorship of the Bible...

...True, and still less justification for the ministration of the state or the university or any other organ of civilization...

...All such passages irritate him, for his philosophy is materialistic...

...Barnes does not read the authors he so copiously names...

...I should like, however, to point out that such a mode of expression is extremely misleading to that miscellaneous body which we call the public...

...But even Dr...

...Will Mr...

...One page further on, clergymen are advised to read to their congregations from Samuel Hopkins Adams's Revelry rather than waste time asking "God's blessing on the visible head of the state...

...The value of the chapter on science and religion may well be guessed from that cruelly unjust appreciation of a great scholar and scientist...

...Barnes will explain to us why it is that the twilight of Christianity is so interminably long, and why it is that the sun of religion never sets...

...Do you tell me that no man living can leap from subject to subject with the agility of a Rocky Mountain goat, and keep it up for 500 pages...

...However, as we read along in his book, it appears probable that he saved himself a great deal of labor by the simple device of reading only one side...

...The rarest spirits of our race will always return to them at every epoch in their lives for consolation, for support and for repose...

...Before dropping the matter of biblical criticism, it may be well to add that Mr...

...But it is time to give some examples of Mr...

...Barnes has read Sir Bertram with blinding prejudice, or he has not read him at all...

...As everyone knows who has so much as looked into the profoundly learned and difficult works of these great critics, they demand long, slow, careful study, and one cannot even safely engage upon that study without years of preparation...

...Close on the heels of this interesting if elementary lesson in natural history, we are told that the Catholic Church is as bad as the Protestant in the matter of indifference to social injustice...

...But Mr...

...But if there are, I can only say that their intellectual vision seems to me to be very defective...

...But thanks at any rate for the comic relief...

...Already in his late teens, or perhaps his early twenties, he had carefully weighed the arguments for and against the traditional view and had "abandoned" it "completely...

...Next, an obscure newspaper in a remote town of Arkansas is given considerable space to explain that if Al Smith is elected, all Protestant married couples will be living in adultery and all their children will be bastards...