The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
Religion
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature
McAfee, Cleland Boyd
Bible -- History; Bible -- Influence; Bible and literature; Bible. English -- Versions -- Authorized
Take the second question, whether these times have not in them elements
that weaken the hold of the Bible. There again we must distinguish between
facts and judgments. There are certain things in these times which relax
the hold of any authoritative book. There is a general relaxing of the
sense of authority. It does not come alone from the intellectual
awakening, because so far as that awakening is concerned, it has affected
quite as much men who continue loyal to the authority of the Bible as
others. No, this relaxing of the sense of authority is the result of the
first feeling of democracy which does not know law. Democracy ought to
mean that men are left independent of the control of other individuals
because they realize and wish to obey the control of God or of the whole
equally with their fellows. When, instead, one feels independent of
others, and adds to that no sense of a higher control which he must be
free to obey, the result is not democracy, but individualism. Democracy
involves control; individualism does not. A vast number of people in
passing from any sense of the right of another individual to control them
have also passed out of the sense of the right of God or of the whole to
control them. So that from a good many all sense of authority has passed.
It is characteristic of our age. And it is a stage in our progress toward
real democracy, toward true human liberty.
Observe that relaxed sense of authority in the common attitude toward law.
Most men feel it right to disregard a law of the community which they do
not like. It appears in trivial things. If the community requires that
ashes be kept in a metal receptacle, citizens approve it in general, but
reserve to themselves the right to consider it a foolish law and to do
something else if that is not entirely convenient. If the law says that
paper must not be thrown on the sidewalk, it means little that it is the
law. Those who are inclined to be clean and neat and do not like to see
paper lying around will keep the law; those who are otherwise will be
indifferent to it. That is at the root of the matter-of-course saying that
a law cannot be enforced unless public opinion sustains it. Under any
democratic system laws virtually always have the majority opinion back of
them; but the minority reserve the right to disregard them if they choose,
and the minority will be more aggressive. Rising from those relaxations of
law into far more important ones, it appears that men in business life,
feeling themselves hampered by legislation, set themselves to find a way
to evade it, justifying themselves in doing so. The mere fact that it is
the law does not weigh heavily. This is, however, only an inevitable stage
in progress from the earliest periods of democracy to later and more
substantial periods. It is a stage which will pass. There will come a
democracy where the rule of the whole is frankly recognized, and where
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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