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Index |
THROUGH the landscape of the New Testament runs a single highway—the King's Highway, where the light of the Holy Presence beats strong. Our unaccustomed eyes are dazzled sometimes by the splendour, and we welcome the invitation to travel now and then down the obscurer by-ways. Here the subdued light falls softly through the shadows, and we are able to see, by the wayside, the lowlier beauties to which the full glory blinds us. It helps to make the New Testament a more real book to us when we know more intimately some of the people whose lives and deeds give the documents body and form. To discover the homelier personal background out of which the New Testament sprang is to relate it more nearly to the life of our day. We win a closer fellowship with the mountain when we have explored the flora on its lower slopes. It is with some of these humble personal details of the men and women who shared the New Testament experience, that we are here concerned. We may without presumption claim that the subject of this book is an aspect of the Humanism of the New Testament.
The book does not by any means pretend to exhaust the Hidden Romance of the New Testament. And indeed many of the conjectures and theories here offered may seem to the reader to be propounded with a much more dogmatic assurance than the writer actually feels. At best only a high probability can be claimed for many of them. One unyieldingly hostile fact is sufficient to destroy a theory. Often a great many friendly ones are needed to establish it. The most probable theory is that which explains the greatest number of the facts, and is contradicted by none of them. Throughout, the writer has sought to keep this principle in view. But two other principles have been followed in the working out of these narratives. One is that because a fact has become thickly encrusted with legend, it is no mark of a true scientific instinct to deny the fact, or dissolve it also into myth or legend. A good deal of the historical criticism of recent years is vitiated by a too facile tendency in this direction. Again, it is often a first principle of this type of criticism that truth must always be commonplace; it cannot on any account be allowed to be stranger than fiction. We assert, on the contrary, that truth is nearly always stranger than fiction. Any life, even the humblest and obscurest life in the world, if written with sympathy and insight, would be as absorbing as the most enthralling romance.
'Tis fiction's, to dilute
To plausibility
Our novel; when 'tis small enough
To credit, 'tisn't true!
And any dullness that may be found on these pages must be set down to the failure of the writer, not to the commonplaceness of the tales. The most romantic story in the world is the romance of the Divine Grace. It is surely not incredible that the journey of that Divine Grace through the traffic-ways of humanity should lead us
Through widening chambers of surprise to where Throbs rapture near an
end that aye recedes, Because His touch is infinite, and lends A yonder to all ends.