THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGIONS. 147 



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 AYestminster 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 alle- 

 gorical 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, f I am far from despis- 

 ing 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 integ- 

 rity 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 criti- 

 cism with belief in the divinely inspired character of a story. It con- 

 sists 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 efiicacy of re- 

 pentance 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 per- 

 haps a reminiscence of the mythical adventure attributed by the cunei- 

 form texts to Bel Merodach,J 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." In- 

 stead of losing by this, the book of Jonah becomes, as M. Kuenen 



* The defenders of the Bible have not been the only ones to venture in this way. 

 Thus, M. Jules Soury, in his desire to make the cylinders square with the doctrine 

 of evolution, once asserted the entire conformity of the Chaldean creation myths with 

 Darwin's theories of the origin and transformation of species. (" Lc Temps," 13th and 

 23d November, 1879.) 



f See the "Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets," by E. Ecndcrson, London, 1845, 

 p. 200. 



X Professor Sayce, " Chaldean Genesis," vol. iii. 



