AN OLD TRANSLATION. "ARE you afraid to do anything, do it." So Emerson has said or quoted, I have forgotten which. I am going to act upon that hint to-day. I am going to preach a sermon upon Robert Collyer's text,* "And Enoch walked with God." It will be so different that you can make no odious comparisons. The text goes on to say, "He was not, for God took him." And in the letter to the Hebrews we read that "Enoch was translated so that he should not see death." It is on the second part of the Old Testament text and on the related verse in the New Testament that I propose to build up my discourse. And now you see what I intended by the subject I announced, " An Old Translation"; namely, the translation of Enoch. And who was Enoch? Shall we say, A man who without any Bible, sacraments, or church, or Christ, managed, nevertheless, to walk with God, and in such a lordly fashion that you can say of him as Dante said of Beatrice, "No quality of cold, nor yet of heat, Robbed us of him as it of others does, That is the ordinary rendering, from which all the brave conclusions of Mr. Collyer's sermon followed, as naturally as the wind-flowers and the violets follow a spell of soft, warm April weather, but which is not necessary in the least degree to the establishment of those conclusions. But now come the scholars and the critics, and they say, with a great deal of unanimity, that there was never any such man as Enoch, that the brief mention of him in the Old Testament is the *The previous Sunday, Dec. 22, 1889. survival of some solar myth. They call our attention to the fact that he was 365 years old when he died, and these years, they assure us, represent the 365 days of the solar year. I do not feel entirely sure that they are right, though it is quite as likely that they are as that a man of the third generation on the earth, whose father was a murderer, should have been too good to live, and too good to die like other people, so that God took him, or, as the New Testament has it, he was translated. : Whatever be the merits of the question, I am very sure of this that in the critical rendering of the text there is quite as much that is suggestive and inspiring as in the other. I am by no means sure that I can draw it out. The popular rendering had to wait two or three thousand years for Robert Collyer to come along and get the splendid meaning out of it that he got last Sunday night. When the critical rendering has waited as long, some Collyer of the future may bring to its interpretation so much poetry and genius, humor and pathos, and broad human strength and sympathy, that it will open in the same flower-like way that the old text did the other night, and let loose as rare a fragrance and disclose as sweet a mystery. However that may be, I can myself, if I am not mistaken, find certain meanings and suggestions in the critical rendering of the text which are not inappropriate to the ending year, and to your general condition, when, after our own special holiday and that in which all Christendom unites, you are disposed to take things quietly and to do as little serious thinking as may be. "An Old Translation," I have said; yet is it newer than the newest I have read of late,- one that Theodore Williams had just made, not from the Japanese, but from Goethe's "Prometheus." This year of God, 1889, has already been translated up to date as perfectly as any year that warmed or chilled the heart of man in the first generations of the world. The old mythologist blundered into a bit of real science. Matter is imperishable. Force is indestructible. There is never any real loss: what disappears on one side reappears upon the other. The vanished heat turns up as electricity or chemical or vital energy. What Longfellow wrote of the domestic side of things is true of every side, of universal life, "There is no death. What seems so is transition." As it is with force and matter, so it is with time. We have not only "all there is": we have all that has ever been. We are heirs of all the ages; and what a great inheritance is ours! Where did the old years go to in the morning of the world? When God took them after they had walked with him the measure of their days, what did he do with them? He translated them. And into what language? Into as many languages as there are forms of matter and of life: into the language of the sea, advanced a little here, withdrawn a little there; into the language of the rocks, seamed by the frost, abraded by the rush of many waters; into the language of the forests and the shrubs and grasses, ripening a million million fruits and seeds for plantings yet to be; into the language of the birds and beasts, turning to songs in little quivering throats, to skill in tiny nests, to care of mothers' wings; turning to the glorious strength of the lion and the tiger, hungering for their prey, to the beauty of their tawny coats, all sunshine or else flecked with sun and shade, to the fierce, innocent joy and rapture of their love and war. Into what language were the old years translated? Into the language of the human, when at length the beast that had been prone stood with his port erect, his face towards heaven, and the endless cycles of man's life on earth began; into man's widening knowledge, as the ordered world began to shape the order of his thought; into domestic love, as more and more the child set in the midst necessitated common care; into the beginnings of the State and Church; into the beginnings of Science and of Art. And, as God took those far-off years and translated them so that they should not see death, so has he taken all the years that have been numbered by the sun's majestic round. And it is very wonderful and beautiful to see how, in this labor of translation, man has been co-operant with God. We can believe that nothing of the old years really died; that all of men's old years lived on in the new order of their personal lives and in the social order of which they were a part. But we have to walk by faith, and not by sight, a great deal of the way; and so we are the more grateful for so much as we can touch and say, Here is something into which God translated the old years of men. And the "so much" is really not a little, even of times that are already three or four thousand years remote. Men did not wish the years to die. They had an instinct to preserve them, hardly less strong than the instinct of self-preservation; and so, in the ages before history and the ages before literature, they fell to singing stories of their tribes and clans, stories their fathers and their grandfathers had told to them, and so began that linking together of the generations which is social experience, which more than anything, perhaps, marks off the human from the animal world and makes social progress possible. Men were poets long before they were historians, and their songs lived in men's memories for many generations before they were written down. It is very likely that the Iliad and Odyssey had no other life than this for generations. In our own time the "Nibelungen Lied” and “ Kalevala," the great epics of the Teutons and the Finns, have been for the first time materialized from the soft air. And, when men began to write their stories down, they wrote them all in poetry at first, not because they thought it more beautiful than prose, but because it was easier to remember. All of the oldest parts of the Old Testament are bits of song. No bit, but a great rounded whole, is the tremendous Song of Deborah in the Book of Judges, in whose bloody stream you are about as near as you can get to the fountain-head of Hebrew literature. But what a translation of the undying years of Hebrew history is the Old Testament in its totality, and how the shifting life of tents lives on for century after century in the metaphors and similes of the prophecies and psalms! And so the Bible in its turn has passed into the life of five-and-twenty centuries of Jewish, twenty centuries of Christian men. I was reading an article only a few days ago about the Bible in Tennyson. But it is not much more in Tennyson than it is in all the modern world. The author was trying to make out that Tennyson was specially Biblical. But I think that my old grandmother knew a dozen Scripture phrases where Tennyson knows one. We are talking Bible and Shakspere all the time, though quite unconsciously. What a man of peace was Garrison! yet such a reader and rememberer of his Bible, and especially of the Old Testament, that its metaphors of war and battle were continually upon his lips. What is all language but a translation of the years of the immeasurable past? "These words are vascular; cut them, and they will bleed," said Emerson of Swedenborg's. Is it not true of words in general? Is not almost every one of them a history? Milton said we might as well kill a man as kill a book. To kill a word is hardly less a sin. And yet we have among us a new set of assassins, calling their scheme of wholesale murder phonetic reform, who would, if they could have their way, destroy the organic life of language, and make it a mere set of arbitrary symbols, with the poetry and history and humanity of years innumerable that have walked with God clean gone from it forever. Into what language does God translate the years when he takes them, so that they may not see death? Into the language of history, using to that end such mighty penmen as Thucydides and Tacitus and Grote and Freeman and Carlyle and Green and Mommsen and Ranke. Be not deceived. Here is no epitaph of death for which there is no resurrection. Here is the life of the past, unwasting like the widow's cruse of oil, for prophets in the wilderness of every later time. Here are great personal examples to instruct and to inspire. Here are great laws of social and political life revealed for those who have the intelligence to penetrate to their essential good. But, if the life of the past |