Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/157

Rh not what it ought to contain in order to conform to our ideas of truth or of justice. "There have been and still are," said Dean Stanley, relative to these points, in his funeral address on Sir Charles Lyell at Westminster Abbey, "two methods of interpretation which have wholly and justly failed: the one that attempts to distort the real sense of the words of the Bible, to make them speak the language of science; and the one which tries to falsify science, in order to satisfy the supposed exigencies of the Bible."

We pass next to the symbolic interpretation. There is nothing to prevent our seeing in Jonah the symbol of the soul, and in the whale that of death or the tomb, so that we might reduce it all to an allegorical representation of man's immortality, such as we see among the monuments of the Catacombs. Or, we might imagine, with Professor Herman von der Hardt, that the vessel in the storm is a figure of the Jewish state, its captain of the high-priest Zadok, and Jonah of King Manasseh, taken prisoner by the Babylonians. I am far from despising the value of this method of reconciling faith with reason, and I have not the courage to blame those who seek thus to save the integrity of their beliefs. But if symbolism permits the accommodation of religious tradition with the progress that has been made in most of the sciences, one branch of knowledge must be excepted from the rule, and that is history, whose mission is to ascertain, not if the old bottles will hold new wine, but what was put into them in the first place.

There is, however, one means of reconciling independence in criticism with belief in the divinely inspired character of a story. It consists in limiting the inspiration to the philosophical and moral truths included in the text, and letting the rest go. Thus, what in the book of Jonah may be of divine origin are the exalted lessons to be drawn from it respecting the prophetic mission of Israel, on the efficacy of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and on the equality of Jews and Gentiles before God. And there is nothing to prevent our seeing in the incident of the whale and the other fabulous details of a narrative which M. Edouard Reuss calls a moral story, a simple invention to give more force and color to the religious and moral lessons, or perhaps a reminiscence of the mythical adventure attributed by the cuneiform texts to Bel Merodach, and which is found besides in the solar mythologies of the Greeks, the Polynesians, the Algonquins, and the Caffres, and in the oldest version of "Little Red Riding Hood." Instead of losing by this, the book of Jonah becomes, as M. Kuenen