THEIR ABSOLUTE AUTHORITATIVENESS. 23

they take for granted that human beings will not question or cavil at their statements. While other writers, when seeking to enforce the doctrines of any positive religion, invariably rest their contentions, implicitly or explicitly, on some superior authority, referring their readers or hearers either to the Vedas, the Koran, the Bible, the Church, or some other recognised standard of belief, and would think it in the last degree presumptuous to claim assent except to what can be found in or deduced from that standard; while those teachers who are not the exponents of any positive, revealed religion, endeavour to prove their conclusions from the common intuitions or the common reasoning faculties of mankind; the writers of these books do neither. They seem to speak with a full confidence that their words need no confirmation either from authority or from reason. If they tell us the story of the creation of the world, they do not think it needful to inform us from what sources the narrative is derived. If they reveal the character of God, it is without explaining the means by which their insight has been obtained. If they lay down the rules of religious or moral conduct, it is not done with the modesty of fallible teachers, but with the voice of unqualified command emanating from the plenitude of power. Of their decisions there can be no discussion; from their sentences there is no appeal.

3. It corresponds with this character that Sacred Books should very generally be anonymous; or more strictly speaking, impersonal; that is, that they should not be put forward in the name of an individual, and that no individual should take credit for their authorship. Understanding the expression in this some

what wider sense, we may say that anonymity is a general characteristic of this class of writings. Their authors do not desire to invite attention to their own. personality, or to claim assent on the ground of respect or consideration towards themselves. On the contrary, they withdraw entirely from observation; they appear to be thoroughly engrossed in the greatness of the subject; and to write not from any deliberate design or with any artistic plan, but simply from the fulness of the inspiration by which they are controlled. Hence not only are the names of the authors in most cases completely lost to us, but they have left us not a hint or an indication by which we could discover what manner of men they were. Even where the name of a writer has been preserved to us, it is often rather by some accident altogether independent of the book, and which in no way alters its anonymous character. We happen to know, on what seems to be good authority, that Lad-tsé composed the Taò-těking, but assuredly there is not a syllable in the work itself which indicates its author. We happen to know beyond a doubt that Mahomet composed the Koran; but the theory of the book is, that it had no human author at all, and it was put forth, not as the prophet's composition, but as the literal reproduction of revelations made to him from heaven. The most noteworthy exceptions are the prophets of the Old Testament and the Pauline, Petrine and Johannine Epistles of the New. But of the prophets, though their names are indeed given, the great majority are little more than a mere name to us; while large portions of the prophecies, attributed in the Jewish Canon to some celebrated prophet, are in reality the work of unknown

THEIR ANONYMITY.

25

writers. This is notoriously the case with the whole of the latter part of our Isaiah; it is the case with parts of Jeremiah; it is the case with Malachi (whose real name is not preserved); it is the case with Daniel.

The Pauline Epistles offer indeed a marked exception to the rule; and some of them are of doubtful authenticity. The Epistles of Peter, of John, of James and Jude, even if their authorship be correctly assigned, are of too limited extent to constitute an exception of any importance. The rest of the Christian Bible follows the rule. Like the Vedic hymns, like the Sutras of Buddhism, like the records of the life and doctrines of Khung-tsé, like the Avesta, all the larger books of the Bible-except the prophetsare anonymous. The whole of the historical portion. of the Old Testament, the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistle to the Hebrews, are-whatever names tradition may have associated with them -strictly the production of unknown authors. This characteristic is one of very high importance, because it indicates along with another which I am about to mention the spirit in which these works were written. They were written as it were unconsciously and undesignedly; not of course without a knowledge on the writer's part of what he was about, but without that conscious and distinct intention of composing a literary work with which ordinary men sit down to write a book. Flowing from the depths of religious feeling, they were the reflection of the age that brought them forth. Generations past and present, nations, communities, brotherhoods of believers, spoke in them and through them. They were not only the work of him who first uttered them or wrote them;

others worked with him, thought with him, spoke with him; they were not merely the voice of an individual, but the voice of an epoch and of a people. Hence the utter absence of any apparent and palpable authorship, the disappearance of the individual in the grandeur of the subject. This phenomenon is not indeed quite peculiar to Sacred Books. It belongs also to those great national epics which likewise express the feelings of whole races and communities of men; to the Mahabharata, to the Ramayana, to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the Volsungen and Nibelungen Sagas, to the Eddas, to the legends of King Arthur and his knights. These poems, or these poetical tales, are anonymous, and they occupy in the veneration of the people a rank which is second only to that of books actually sacred. In some other respects they bear a resemblance to Sacred Books, but these books differ from them in one important particular, which of itself suffices to place them in a different category. What that particular is must now be explained.

4. If I were to describe it by a single word, I should call it their formlessness. The term is an awkward one, but I know of no other which so exactly describes this most peculiar feature of Sacred Books. Like the earth in its chaotic condition before creation, they are "without form." That artistic finish, that construction, combination of parts into a well-defined edifice, that arrangement of the whole work upon an apparent plan, subservient to a distinct object, which marks every other class of the productions of the human mind, is entirely wanting to them. They read not unfrequently as if they had been

their foRMLESSNESS.

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carelessly jotted down without the smallest regard to order, or the least attention to the effect to be produced on the mind of the reader. Sometimes they may even be said to have neither beginning, middle, nor end. We might open them anywhere and close them anywhere without material difference. Sometimes there is a distinct progress in the narrative, but it is nevertheless wholly without methodical combination of the separate parts into a well-ordered whole. Herein they differ also from those poetical Epics which we have found agreeing with them in being virtually anonymous. Nothing can exceed the grace, the finish, the perfection of style, of those immortal poems which are known as Homeric. The northern Epics are indeed simpler, ruder, far more destitute of literary merit. The first part, for instance, of the Edda Saemundar (which perhaps ought not to be called an Epic at all) is to the last degree uncouth and barbarous. But then the subjectmatter of this portion of the Edda is such as belongs properly to Sacred Books, and had it ever been actually current among the Scandinavians as a canonical work-of which we have no evidence-it would be entitled to a place among them. When we come to the second or heroic portion of this Edda, the case is different. The mode of treatment is still rude and unattractive, but if, unrepelled by the outward form, we study the longest of the narratives which this division contains-the Saga of the Volsungs-we shall discover in it a tale, which for the exquisite pathos of its sentiments, for the deep and tragic interest which centres round the principal characters, for the vivid delineation by a few brief touches of the